Antihumanism

Not to be confused with anti-human sentiment.

tence. For Heidegger, humanism takes consciousness as

the paradigm of philosophy, leading it to a subjectivism
and idealism that must be avoided. Like Hegel before
him, Heidegger rejected the Kantian notion of autonomy,
pointing out that humans were social and historical beings, as well as Kants notion of a constituting consciousness. Heidegger nevertheless retains links both to humanism and to existentialism despite his eorts to distance himself from both in the Letter on Humanism
(1947).[10]

In social theory and philosophy, antihumanism (or

anti-humanism) is a theory that is critical of traditional humanism and traditional ideas about humanity
and the human condition.[1] Central to antihumanism is
the view that concepts of "human nature", man, or
humanity, should be rejected as historically relative or
metaphysical.[2]

Origins

2 Positivism and scientism

In the late 18th and 19th centuries, the philosophy of

humanism was a cornerstone of the Enlightenment. From
the belief in a universal moral core of humanity it followed that all persons are inherently free and equal. For
liberal humanists such as Kant, the universal law of
reason was a guide towards total emancipation from any
kind of tyranny.[3]

Positivism is a philosophy of science based on the view

that in the social as well as natural sciences, information
derived from sensory experience, and logical and mathematical treatments of such data, are together the exclusive source of all authoritative knowledge.[11] Positivism
assumes that there is valid knowledge (truth) only in scientic knowledge.[12] Obtaining and verifying data that
can be received from the senses is known as empirical
evidence.[11] This view holds that society operates according to general laws like the physical world. Introspective and intuitional attempts to gain knowledge are
rejected. Though the positivist approach has been a recurrent theme in the history of Western thought,[13] the
concept was developed in the modern sense in the early
19th century by the philosopher and founding sociologist, Auguste Comte.[14] Comte argued that society operates according to its own quasi-absolute laws, much as
the physical world operates according to gravity and other
absolute laws of nature.[15]

Criticism of humanism being over-idealistic swiftly began in the 19th Century. For Friedrich Nietzsche, humanism was nothing more than an empty gure of speech
[4]
- a secular version of theism. He argues in Genealogy
of Morals that human rights exist as a means for the weak
to constrain the strong; as such, they deny rather than facilitate emancipation of life.[5] Nevertheless the author
Claude Pavur in a book called Nietzsche Humanist argues
that there are excellent ground for reading Nietzsche rst
and foremost as a humanist.[6]
The young Karl Marx is sometimes considered a
humanist,[7] as opposed to the mature Marx who became
more forceful in his criticism of human rights as idealist
or utopian. Given that capitalism forces individuals to
behave in a prot-seeking manner, they are in constant
conict with one another, and are thus in need of rights to
protect themselves. Human rights, Marx believed, were a
product of the very dehumanisation they were intended to
oppose. True emancipation, he asserted, could only come
through the establishment of communism, which abolishes the private ownership of all means of production.[8]

Humanist thinker Tzvetan Todorov has identied within

modernity a trend of thought which emphasizes science
and within it tends towards a deterministic view of the
world. He clearly identies positivist theorist Auguste
Comte as an important proponent of this view.[16] For
Todorov "Scientism does not eliminate the will but decides that since the results of science are valid for everyone, this will must be something shared, not individual.
In practice, the individual must submit to the collectivity, which knows better than he does. The autonomy
of the will is maintained, but it is the will of the group,
not the person...scientism has ourished in two very different political contexts...The rst variant of scientism
was put into practice by totalitarian regimes.[17] A similar criticism can be found in the work associated with
the 'Frankfurt School' of social research. Antipositivism

In the 20th century, the view of humans as rationally autonomous was challenged by Sigmund Freud, who believed humans to be largely driven by unconscious irrational desires.[9]
Martin Heidegger viewed humanism as a metaphysical philosophy that ascribes to humanity a universal
essence and privileges it above all other forms of exis1

6 SEE ALSO

would be further facilitated by rejections of 'scientism';

or science as ideology. Jrgen Habermas argues, in his
On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967), that the positivist thesis of unied science, which assimilates all the
sciences to a natural-scientic model, fails because of
the intimate relationship between the social sciences and
history, and the fact that they are based on a situationspecic understanding of meaning that can be explicated
only hermeneutically ... access to a symbolically prestructured reality cannot be gained by observation alone.[18]

continued all the more to problematize the human subject, favoring the term the decenter-ed subject which
implies the absence of human agency. Derrida, arguing that the fundamentally ambiguous nature of language makes intention unknowable, attacked Enlightenment perfectionism, and condemned as futile the existentialist quest for authenticity in the face of the allembracing network of signs. He stressed repeatedly that
the subject is not some meta-linguistic substance or identity, some pure cogito of self-presence; it is always inscribed in language.[26]

Foucault challenged the foundational aspects of Enlightenment humanism,[27] as well as their strate3 Structuralism
gic implications, arguing that they either produced
counter-emancipatory results directly, or matched inStructuralism was developed in post-war Paris as a recreased freedom with increased and disciplinary
sponse to the perceived contradiction between the free
normatization.[28]
subject of philosophy and the determined subject of the
human sciences;[19] and drew on the systematic linguistics His anti-humanist scepticism extended to attempts to
of Saussure for a view of language and culture as a con- ground theory in human feeling, as much as in human
ventional system of signs preceding the individual sub- reason, maintaining that both were historically contingent
constructs, rather than the universals humanism mainjects entry into them.[20]
tained.
Lvi-Strauss in anthropology systematised a structuralist
analysis of culture in which the individual subject dissolved into a signifying convention;[21] the semiological
work of Roland Barthes (1977) decried the cult of the 5 Cultural examples
author and indeed proclaimed his death; while Lacan's
structuralist psychoanalysis inevitably led to a similar di- The heroine of the novel Nice Work begins by dening
minishment of the concept of the autonomous individual: herself as a semiotic materialist, a subject position in an
man with a discourse on freedom which must certainly innite web of discourses - the discourses of power, sex,
be called delusional...produced as it is by an animal at the family, science, religion, poetry, etc.[29] Charged with
taking a bleak deterministic view, she retorts, antihumercy of language.[22]
manist, yes; inhuman, no...the truly determined subject is
Taking a lead from Brecht's twin attack on bourgeois
he who is not aware of the discursive formations that deand socialist humanism,[23] Marxist philosopher Louis
termine him.[30] However, with greater life-experience,
Althusser coined the term antihumanism in an attack
she comes closer to accepting that post-structuralism is
against Marxist humanists, whose position he considered
an intriguing philosophical game, but probably meaninga revisionist movement. Althusser considered structure
less to those who have not yet even gained awareness of
and social relations to have primacy over individual
humanism itself.[31]
consciousness, opposing the philosophy of the subject.[24]
For Althusser, the beliefs, desires, preferences and judgements of the human individual are the product of social
practices, as society moulds the individual in its own im- 6 See also
age through its ideologies.
Anti-foundationalism
For Marxist humanists such as Georg Lukcs, revolution was contingent on the development of the class con Antimaterialism
sciousness of an historical subject, the proletariat. In op Humanism
position to this, Althussers antihumanism downplays the
role of human agency in the process of history.
New Historicism
Marxs theory of human nature

Post-structuralism and deconstruction

Modernism
Nancy Fraser
Postmodernism

Post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques

Derrida rejected structuralisms insistence on xed meaning, its privileging of a meta-linguistic standpoint;[25] but

Stanley Fish
Structural Marxism

References

[1] J. Childers/G. Hentzi eds., The Columbia Dictionary of

Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1995) p. 140-1
[2] Childers, p. 100
[3] Childers, p. 95-6
[4] Tony Davies, Humanism (1997) p. 37
[5] Genealogy of Morals III:14
[6] Claude Pavur. Nietzsche Humanist. Marquette University
Press, 1998

[25] Appignanesi, p. 76-9

[26] Quoted in John D. Caputo, The Tears and Prayers of
Jacques Derrida (1997) p. 349
[27] G. Gutting ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault
(2003) p. 384
[28] Gutting, p. 277
[29] David Lodge, Nice Work (1988) p. 21-2
[30] Lodge, p. 22
[31] Lodge, p. 153 and p. 225

[7] Marxist Humanism

[8] Karl Marx On the Jewish Question (1843)
[9] Peter Gay, Freud (1989) p. 449
[10] What becomes of the Human after Humanism?

8 Further reading
Roland Barthes, Image: Music: Text (1977)
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966)

[11] John J. Macionis, Linda M. Gerber, Sociology, Seventh

Canadian Edition, Pearson Canada

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977)

[12] Jorge Larrain (1979) The Concept of Ideology p.197, quotation:

Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism (1947)

reprinted in Basic Writings

one of the features of positivism is precisely its postulate that scientic knowledge
is the paradigm of valid knowledge, a postulate that indeed is never proved nor intended
to be proved.
[13] Cohen, Louis; Maldonado, Antonio (2007). Research
Methods In Education. British Journal of Educational
Studies (Routledge) 55 (4): 9. doi:10.1111/j.14678527.2007.00388_4.x..
[14] Sociology Guide. Auguste Comte. Sociology Guide.
[15] Macionis, John J. (2012). Sociology 14th Edition. Boston:
Pearson. p. 11. ISBN 978-0-205-11671-3.
[16] Tzvetan Todorov. The Imperfect Garden. Princeton University Press. 2001. Pg. 20
[17] Tzvetan Todorov. The Imperfect Garden. Princeton University Press. 2001. Pg. 23
[18] Outhwaite, William, 1988 Habermas: Key Contemporary
Thinkers, Polity Press (Second Edition 2009), ISBN 9780-7456-4328-1 p.22
[19] Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (2005) p. 332
[20] R. Appignanesi/C. Garratt, Postmodernism for Beginners
(1995) p. 56-60
[21] Appiganesi, p. 66-7
[22] Jacques Lacan, crits: A Selection (1997) p. 216 and p.
264
[23] M. Hardt/K. Weeks eds., The Jameson Reader (2005) p.
150
[24] Simon Choat, Marx through Post-Structuralism (2010) p.
17

Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question (1843)

reprinted in Early Writings
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
(1887)
Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism that is not Humanist (2010)

9 External links
James Hearteld, Postmodernism and the Death of
the Subject

10

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